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Learning The Language of a Brand

New Guidelines, New Rules

Making things move while keeping the spirit of a brand alive is a puzzle that we love to solve here at First Person. So when NetApp came to us wanting to bring motion to their rebranding efforts we were excited for the challenge. Starting from scratch, we worked directly with the NetApp brand and video team creating guidelines and themes for different internal videos. These systems incorporated their new brand principles creating beautiful, interesting and entertaining videos.

The Result

New Life

The direct messaging and straightforward imagery helped NetApp customers of all expertise levels understand extremely complex IT content. We additionaly created beautiful tools for NetApp to showcase and sell their products.

The new video guidelines First Person created have given NetApp a consistent video feel, not just in brand, but in animation style and motion.

How?

Learn The Brand, Learn The Meaning

We studied the brand, learned the new rules and listened to the explanations and reasons for the changes. With this insight, we followed the NetApp core principles of SMART, DIRECT, SOLID and WARM. NetApp wanted a simplified visual message and to move away from previous use of metaphors.

NetApp wanted direct messages that were short and easy to digest.

We took this to heart when creating the new style for the NetApp Technomericals. Using simple and straight forward pictographs and illustrations First Person created a system for creating elegant animations that would illustrate complex IT problems. Working directly with each NetApp group, First Person brainstormed, designed, storyboarded and created a system that gave each video their own feel while keeping them all connected under a unified Technomercial look and feel.

Data Fabric

Data Fabric is a new concept for many people in the IT industry. Working directly with the Data Fabric team, we created this video to explain the current problem with managing data across multiple clouds and NetApp’s solution of connecting the data center with multiple cloud services, delivering on the vision of a Data Fabric.

CEO George Kurian on Data Fabric

In this video, we animated a speech given by NetApp’s CEO George Kurian.

Learning Outcomes

Defining Motion

After creating rules for smart color usage, standardizing opening logo animations, working out transition options, crafting guides for line weights and a language for the movement of data, all the hard work paid off—the NetApp brand was brought to life. We finalized all these findings in the NetApp Technomercial Guidelines.

Bringing Brands to Life

Bringing brands to life is exciting. We know how much work and thought you put into your brand guidelines and we love bringing that care into making the guidelines come alive and move. By asking questions, understanding meaning, reason and culture we strive to bring the life you can feel from your guidelines into animation and movement people can see and feel.